Pony Ma Promises Tencent Will Be Open Within 6 Months

Tencent, is the biggest Internet company and probably the most mysterious company in China. Suffering the more and more complains from local companies which saying Tencent is killing the innovation in Chinese web as it strategically copies almost everything, Pony Ma, the CEO of Tencent, today said to the audience in a conference, Tencent wil be open within 6 months. And he also emphasized that the next 6 month will be very important for Tencent as it is the transition period towards an open company.

Pony said the first open product would QZone, Tencent’s social network; and even for QQ, Pony promises it will be open to the third-parties applications too.

Tencent has been trying to be more open, Pony said, but he admitted that the progress was slow. The battle against 360, along with the resulting pressure from local media/social buzz trigger him to make the decision to speed up the open strategy. “We wanted to do everything on our own before, but now we have realized that a great enterprise should not be always like this, we should allow third-parties to work together with us.” Pony said.

As a sign to further open, Tencent recently launched its so called Tencent Open Platform Directory to demonstrate its effort. The directory includes five open platfors, open.tenpay.com which is for Tencent’s payment gateway; pop.paipai.com for its e-commerce site; open.soso.com for its web search service; opensns.qq.com for its social network and open.t.qq.com for Tencent’s microblogging service.

If Tencent could be really open as Pony promises, Chinese web industry in 2011 would be truly exicting.